You have probably heard the parable of the blind men and the elephant. One feels the trunk and says it’s a snake, another feels a leg and claims it’s a tree. It warns of how focusing on single parts can obscure the whole. Neuroscience made the same mistake for decades, viewing the brain as a collection of specialised regions, each working on a distinct function. Our understanding of what each region did often stemmed from incredible accidents, like the case of Phineas Gage, a 19th-century railway worker who survived having an iron rod blown through his brain. His personality change was blamed on frontal lobe damage. More recently, we have gained insights from brain stimulation studies that tied the amygdala to emotions, the occipital lobe to vision, and so on. Brain regions do specialise, but that isn’t the whole picture. Advances in imaging technologies in the late 1990s and early 2000s, notably functional MRI and PET, allowed scientists to observe the whole brain in action. What they discovered transformed neuroscience. Brain regions don’t operate alone …